We Must Refuse to Normalize Trumplandia

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I’m of the opinion that Trumplandia is an anomaly in America’s history, much like Vichy France was anomaly in that otherwise proud nation’s history. Americans are too easy to poke fun of the French for Vichy France, when France pretty much ruled much of Europe for 20 years just a hundred years before.

So let’s talk Trumplandia.

First, I keep talking about it, but what is Trumplandia? I first heard the term during the 2016 election cycle when someone said the FBI was “Trumplandia.” I found the term intriguing and as events progressed I gradually came to see Trumplandia as America’s version of Vichy France. Trumplandia is that collection of individuals who support Trump for various reasons and are so blinded by their devotion to him on a personal level that they’ve lost sight of the obvious: this is not normal.

It’s not normal and the sooner those of us who oppose Trumplandia stop being outraged and start being engaged, the better. That’s the crux of the problem of The Resistance, I think. It is way, way too easy to stay angry all the time to such an extent that you get burnt out.

But instead of getting burnt out, I would suggest we, the opposition, get engaged. We have to stay focused. We have to keep our eyes on the prize — at the very least flipping Congress in 2018. The Vichy Republicans who cower in front of Trump are at the center of the bizarre situation we find ourselves in during the Trumplandia Era.

To me, the most startling aspect of Trumplandia, the part of it that could potentially make someone white hot with rage, is that seemingly otherwise normal individuals willfully voted for a bigot, a racist and a misogynist. That such a thing happened at all in this nation that I love continues to blow my mind.

What’s worse, there continues to be an active effort to normalize Trumplandia. There is definitely a disconnect between what a large segment of the population thinks about Trumplandia and what the mainstream media thinks. You see that disconnect in various places like Twitter and the late night comedy shows. It is there that right minded people are openly debating if the President of the United States is a traitor, a quisling.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media is only slowly beginning to realize the gravity of all of this. After facilitating Donald Trump’s rise to power, media outlets like MSNBC’s Morning Joe are just now, reluctantly beginning to see the error of their ways. That doesn’t even begin to address outlets like Axios which are built from the ground up to be complicit in normalizing Trumplandia.

That’s why all of this is so troubling.

We are living in a dystopian present and there doesn’t seem to be anyway out. There doesn’t seem to be any easy answers for the foreseeable future for no other reason than the Vichy Republicans are so complicit in Trumplandia that they wouldn’t do anything to Trump politically, even if it was proven that his 2016 campaign actively colluded with the Russian efforts to hack our election.

So, as I keep saying, we need to put our outrage to work. We need to stop being outraged and we need to start being engaged. That is the path out of this dystopia. That is the path out of surreal political environment that we find ourselves in.

Only by using our outrage in a constructive, meaningful manner can we smite Trumplandia from our political landscape once and for all. The weird thing about Trumplandia is it has completely upended the traditional Left-Right spectrum, at least on social media.

But history does not go in a straight line. There will be setbacks. Maybe even a lot of them. But if we stay engaged, stay focused it is inevitable that at some point we will be victorious.

Shelton Bumgarner is the editor and publisher of The TrumplandiaReport. He may be reached at migukin (at) gmail.com.